


light piece

by peculiar_mademoiselle



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M, Yoko-centric, slight BDSM mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:40:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25492492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peculiar_mademoiselle/pseuds/peculiar_mademoiselle
Summary: "Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time."Moments in time with Yoko Ono, as she reflects on light and John Lennon.
Relationships: John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Yoko Ono
Comments: 9
Kudos: 20





	light piece

The first time she’s properly invited to Kenwood, it isn’t at all what she expects. John had been clipped on the phone, harried, instructing her to get in a cab and just _get over here_. It must be a party she thinks, a little get together featuring all the people John has collected over the years like vintage stamps, colourful and fun, for a little while at least. But when she arrives the house is monolithic in the dark, silent as the grave, only one toppermost window illuminated. 

John is waiting for her on the steps, chewing on a hangnail. His hair is greasy and lank, and frames his face in blood red thanks to the low light. Their conversation is awkward, stilted, that moment before a speech where one clears their throat, and winces at the feedback coming through the microphone. She glances over the rim of her teacup, watching him shift in his seat uncomfortably. She doesn’t do small talk, never has. Despite the whole world telling women that they must, she doesn’t accommodate. People must come to her. 

It’s odd though, this silence. Words come so easy to them in their letters. She has a whole stack shoved in her bedside drawer, some are long and philosophical (he is so very clever) and some are manic, desperate, the pen pushed so deep into the paper she could close her eyes and read them by touch. It’s in those that he calls her ‘my Yoko’ - she rubs the pads of her fingers across the words, backwards and forwards, until the tips are stained grey with ink. The address chills and excites in equal measure. His. His Yoko. 

He eventually pops the silence like a bubble, asking that she build the tower of light listed in her book for him. She catches her laugh right before it leaves her mouth, knowing he’d hate her if he heard it. 

“Well, it’s conceptual. I can’t actually _build_ it,” she says lightly, briefly imagining herself in a hard hat with a trowel, wiping brick dust from her face. What a world. 

He has half a second of realisation, pink spots appearing on pale cheeks, before he shakes his head and laughs it off and makes out he knew all along. She allows it. 

Yet as he moves closer, carding a long fingered hand through her curtain of hair, she thinks about the light pouring from this one high window. The warmth flowing from his mouth to where he’s now pressed it at the hollow of her throat, and beaming outward into the night. This could be his light tower, if he wished it to be. 

~

Years later she’ll try and replicate that feeling with the Dakota. It’s certainly high enough, and the white furnishings gleam even under the softest lamps. John seems to alternately blend in and stand out amongst them. 

Some days her husband will gaze at her, awed and thankful, the way he had when she’d told him he could finally come home. When he’d collapsed on their big white bed and declared that this was where he belonged. She’d smiled then, just as she smiles now when John is in that humour, but truthfully she’d known that someone like him doesn’t _belong_ anywhere. Or rather, they belong to too many people and too many places, and find themself painfully stretched between them, a man drawn but not yet hanged or quartered. 

When May had last called, her voice rattling with unshed tears, she’d told Yoko that she hoped they’d be happy. On reflection it was probably a slight, but she’d never been great at spotting those. At Abbey Road some six years ago, a few of the girls outside had presented her with a fat bouquet of fragrant yellow roses, and she’d accepted them with a grateful smile. She was halfway inside the building before the snide laughter registered and the realisation sluiced down her back like cold water. John noticed her face fall, comprehension dawning across his own brow, before giving way to a thunderous anger. He’d ripped the blooms from her arms wordlessly, and shoved them straight in the nearest bin. She tried to smile less after that. Just in case. 

Still, the answer that she’d given May would have been the same whether it was a genuine blessing or a muttered curse, for it was plucked straight from somewhere deep within her. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever be happy.”

Deep down she knows John feels the same. He disappears sometimes, ostensibly working or baking or whatever it is he does when he’s alone. But she can feel the faint music shaking the foundations of their home, Paul’s voice crooning from a record that John swears he didn’t buy. She pictures him, leaning over the player like it’s his scrying bowl, trying to catch a glimpse of some past he can’t pin down, some future that he’ll never live. 

There were times when she’d envision the same, she’d watch him gasping with pleasure, pinned to the floor by her spiky black boot on his milky white chest, and try not to think about others who’d felt the same rush of affection and jealousy and _love_ with this man beneath them. Of course she doesn’t know for sure who has, but she knows that she picked this particular shiny red apple up off the floor, she didn’t pluck it from the tree. 

~

Her husband’s death is transformative. She feels hollowed out, like the pumpkin Sean and the nanny gleefully pulled apart last Halloween, whatever was inside her was dragged out and dumped on the floor of that ER, sinking into the ground before she could even attempt at grabbing it back. Lying, shaking in bed, she wants to scream in such a way that’ll make her heaviest songs sound like Mama Cass’ version of Dream A Little Dream Of Me, but it won’t come. It’s jammed in her throat like a physical wedge, she can barely swallow against it.

The last time she’d felt like this had been in the institution, when she’d laid in bed drowning in dark water that no-one else could see, choking as it flooded her mouth, her nose. Tony had arrived then, with fresh flowers every day, until her room was full of them. Surrounded by thorns like Sleeping Beauty, nurses had cooed over her, and him. “He really loves you, you know?” one had whispered breathlessly, toying with one of the floppy indolent plants, attempting to stand it back up straight. 

If only Tony would come to her now. She’d trade every flower in the world for the bloom that was Kyoko, the Kyoko of her mind's eye would squirm as she brushed her round face, giggle when she gently bopped her nose. Of course Kyoko is probably taller than her mother now, but in her fantasies she’s the doll-like creature who jumped into her arms at Heathrow Airport, one of the few people on the planet content to ignore John completely and instead tug at her Mommy’s wide-brimmed white hat. 

Kyoko is gone though, and instead there is Sean. Always loud and laughing, following his Daddy round like a duckling, staring at him like he hung the moon. She’d never really held Sean close, preferring to cut a distant figure, the Goddess mother of a demigod. But she’d be damned if she’d lose him now. She’d loosened her grip on the things she loved too many times, and it’s a mistake she swears she’ll never repeat. 

Eventually she stands herself up again, fashioning splints from her fury and her bitterness, binding up her spirit like a plant with a broken stem. She starts wearing the screen sunglasses John had bought her all the time, even in the house. They’re a window to see the world through, and a window she can take cover behind.

Calling Julian is hard, and harder still is when he passes the phone off to Cynthia. Cynthia who has said more about her in interviews than words they have ever exchanged. She always sounds breathy and sorrowful, yet indignant. A school child upset to have lost a game they didn’t quite know they were playing. _But Sir, it’s not fair, Yoko cheated_. It’s probably true, she hadn’t played fair, but John had burned the rulebook long before she joined the game. 

She tells Cynthia she can’t come to New York. Laughter accompanies her explanation, it’s meant to sound jovial, but it’s brittle and jagged, fragments of broken glass bouncing off a tiled floor. 

“After all, you’re not my friend,” she says gently, the words like icy hands pressing against a purpling bruise. 

~

It’s a shock, when Paul calls. He sounds exhausted, listless, his usual charm bleached away, a faded version of its previous vibrancy. He tells her he’s sorry, and she rolls her eyes. Everyone’s sorry. She can’t buy a bloody newspaper without people telling her how sorry they are. She’s started just nodding in response. It’s intriguing, however, when his apology has an addendum. 

“And I’m sorry for everything, Yoko. I...I think I made a mistake. You’re, um, you _were_ John’s wife and I was..very fond of him so-”

“I’m not interested in your pity, Paul,” she cuts him off, tiredly, suddenly glad he’s not in front of her, those big doe-eyes trying to find hers behind the darkened glass. He splutters a little, shocked that she’s taken one look at his olive branch and flicked it back into his face. 

“Was that all?” she musters her best business-like tone, the one she uses when a deal isn’t worth her time, when a man makes it clear he thinks she doesn’t know what she’s doing. 

“Yeah. Yeah. I understand,” his voice is full of something that is almost wonder, the conversation having derailed from the track he’d set it on so quickly, that he could only blink at the wreckage in shock. There’s something endearing about it, and it’s that endearment that opens her mouth before she can stop it. 

“He loved you,” she says neutrally, like she’s telling him the time, or the weather outside. Still, he gasps as though hit in the gut with a baseball bat. 

“He did?” it’s said weakly, a question, a plea for more. She gives it, because she can. Because John is no longer here to be pained by the way he’s being stretched between them, one arm each. 

“Yes. He’d listen to your records all the time. Like he was looking for you.”

She does the polite thing, and pretends she can’t hear him crying. Waiting, she taps her nails on the plastic of the phone. Is this her life now? Doling out the remnants of John’s love like a witch with poisonous candy? 

“He knew where to find me,” Paul whispers, and she shivers with it, but only hums in response. She’s not sure her thoughts on that would make him very happy, and it would be wasteful to stick the boot in after she’s tried to be kind. 

She gets off the line pretty soon after that, Paul is so thankful for these scraps that it makes something in her chest ping loose like a broken guitar string, and she has to sit down. The phone hangs limply at her side, bouncing a little on it’s coiled cord. She’s tempted to keep it off the cradle for a while, but can’t risk it, what if Tony’s seen her distraught face printed on the front page of every major newspaper in the world, and it cracked the ice in his heart? The phone must always be reachable, always. 

As she’s placing it back, the light glints off her wedding ring, briefly making it glow. The day John slipped it on flashes to the forefront of her mind, and with the thought of John’s arm on her waist and the sea crashing against the rocks, she feels those waves break inside her own skull, salt water overflowing from her eyes and slipping down her face. 

Suddenly John is there, in all his iterations. The hungry-eyed man, blowing air in her face at the Indica. The broken man at an empty Kenwood. John in white. John in black. Fist raised at a protest. Fist raised in a fight. His head in his hands as he weeps. Her head in his hands as they kiss. The throng of people outside have started playing _Imagine_ again, and for the first time in days she doesn’t want to throw her boot at them from the window. John was so many things, so many intersections of so many rays, near and far and everywhere in between. She throws her head back and laughs when she understands what she’s describing. A tower of light.

**_Architectural Works Sales List _ **

**_– A house constructed of light from prisms, which exists in accordance with the changes in the day._ **

**_Yoko Ono, Grapefruit, 1965._ **

**Author's Note:**

> Yoko Ono conceived the Imagine Peace tower in Iceland, a tower of light first dreamed up in her book, Grapefruit, and something John asked her to build for him the first time she was at Kenwood. When the technology caught up, she commissioned said tower, and it was completed in 2007. A panel on it reads ‘I dedicate this tower to John Lennon. My love for you is forever.’ 
> 
> I have a great deal of admiration for Yoko, and her creative output. Her writing, art and music have all been very inspirational for me, and I think they're genuinely brilliant pieces of work. 
> 
> However, this fic was not conceived as 'pro' or 'anti' Yoko, rather it's an attempt to explore Yoko as a multifaceted and complicated individual. 
> 
> Of course, this is all fiction, though there are numerous references to stories told by Yoko, John, Cynthia, May and Paul in interviews. Kudos to you if you can spot them all! 
> 
> I'd like to dedicate this work to kreekey on tumblr, thank-you for all the Yoko-based chats. All the love. 
> 
> My tumblr is comewhatbrianmay, come join me if neutral to positive Yoko content floats your boat/mildly intrigues you/annoys you to the point that you sort of want to see it anyway.
> 
> Thank-you for reading, and this is a bit of a divergence for me, so do let me know what you think! x


End file.
